Atlanta Police Concede Mistakes in Responding to Courthouse Shooting

Published: March 19, 2005

The city's embattled Police Department acknowledged Friday that it made mistakes just after the deadly courthouse rampage here a week ago, and the chief said the suspect had spent as much as 12 hours undetected outside a busy mall.

The police chief, Richard J. Pennington, said he would oversee a full review of his department's response to the attacks. Among the issues to be studied, Chief Pennington said, will be communication problems among law enforcement agencies and their mistaken focus on searching for a carjacked vehicle that they believed the accused, Brian Nichols, was using to flee.

The car later turned up on a different level in the same parking garage from which it had been taken, though a witness had told the authorities that it had been driven away.

''We should have gone through the entire building,'' Chief Pennington said at a news conference. ''We didn't, based on the information we had at the time.''

The police chief was joined at the news conference by Mayor Shirley Franklin, who said she believed it was important to review the city's protocols for responding to major crimes like the courthouse shooting and its aftermath. But Mayor Franklin also offered a reminder that the situation immediately after the attack was chaotic.

''We have nothing to hide,'' she said, adding that the city recognized that there were ''opportunities for improvement.''

The authorities say that while the 33-year-old Mr. Nichols was in the Fulton County Courthouse last Friday for his retrial on rape charges, he attacked a deputy and retrieved her gun from a lockbox, then moved on to the courtroom and killed a judge and a court reporter. Investigators say that in fleeing he then killed a deputy and later an off-duty federal agent before surrendering, some 26 hours after the courthouse attack.

Though acknowledging missteps, Chief Pennington noted in an interview after the news conference that the Sheriff's Department, not the Police Department, was responsible for courthouse security.

He also said Mr. Nichols had eluded capture for so long because of inconspicuous behavior.

The chief said Mr. Nichols boarded a subway train shortly after the shootings and rode north about seven miles to the Lenox Square Mall stop. Wearing a jacket he had stolen in the carjacking, he spent much of the day milling about in the streets around the mall, the chief said.

Mr. Nichols did not surface until some 13 hours after the shooting, when officers received a report of a couple assaulted near the Lenox Square train station by a man matching the suspect's description. It was another 13 hours before he was caught.

The police chief said the authorities were now looking into whether the birth of Mr. Nichols's baby boy three days earlier had added to his stress from being jailed and on trial in a case where conviction could bring a life sentence.